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Postmates laid off all its city managers yesterday
- mathattack 9y agoWow - that's not long after their last fundraise. 15 people is not a lot, but it's a signal of a big pivot.
- mmmpop 9y ago>> [...] it's a signal of a failure. Fixed that for ya!
- lex_luthor 9y agoSurprising. They could be changing their strategy. I doubt it is a money issue they raised $140M in series D financing last year.
- ericabiz 9y agoFTA: "and other things to and from stores (eg, getting your broken iPhone to a Postmates-using repair shop)." Yeah, about that. We run repair shops, and were approached by Favor (Postmates competitor) about doing this. We love Favor; they are local to us in Austin and we'd like to do more business with them. The problem was insurance. Our insurance refused to cover it as the phone wouldn't be in our possession. And (at least at the time) Favor's insurance also was not covering if a phone was lost or stolen during a "run." When it's a small food order (most of the food orders they run are around $20-$30, or even less), it's not the end of the world if something gets lost or stolen. It's a lot bigger deal if it's a $969 iPhone 7+. Even with a broken screen and iCloud locked, they're still (unfortunately) worth significant money on the black market. As far as I know, no delivery company has overcome this hurdle.
- mahyarm 9y agoMost traditional shipping companies do have shipping insurance.
- xur17 9y agoI've always wanted to to use Favor or Postmastes to deliver packages to UPS, but it never ends up being worth the risk. It's interesting to hear that insurance ends up being the issue. Presumably UPS and Fedex have insurance for this, I wonder if they'd ever partner, and use their insurance.
- trimbo 9y ago> I've always wanted to to use Favor or Postmastes to deliver packages to UPS Why? You can schedule pickups for Fedex and UPS for no fee, and have same-day pickup in some areas. http://www.fedex.com/us/fcl/pckgenvlp/pickup/ http://www.fedex.com/us/fcl/pckgenvlp/pickup/ https://wwwapps.ups.com/pickup/schedule?loc=en_US https://wwwapps.ups.com/pickup/schedule?loc=en_US
- xur17 9y agoUPS and Fedex don't pickup on the weekends. In the past when I looked, you couldn't specify a time with very much granularity, but it looks like that is an option now, so I'll have to try it out.
- pbarnes_1 9y agohttps://www.shyp.com/ https://www.shyp.com/
- xur17 9y agoUnfortunately it doesn't work in my city, and requires you to buy the label from them as far as I can tell. I am shipping to Amazon FBA, so they provide the label (at a large discount).
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
- jmartens 9y agoI've noticed that even in San Francisco's Mission District, I can almost never get a Postmate to accept my order. Could be high demand, or could be no supply. My guess is the latter.
- SallySwanSmith 9y agoSame in Seattle. After 10 minutes of attempts I always give up and use someone else
- snowmaker 9y agoI've noticed the same. It's been striking in the last few months. There used to be plenty of availability, but recently, the service is almost unusable due to lack of supply. It makes me wonder if things are much more seriously wrong than they are admitting.
- 27182818284 9y agoI've checked in on Postmates and Instacart both over the course of more than a year and both were unavailable in my area then and now. At the same time, Lyft and Uber have been here a while and now local businesses have been started to fill the Postmates/Instacart void. It feels like a missed opportunity for growth.
- ghaff 9y agoIt may be difficult to compare directly. Instacart isn't available for me. (It's available closer in to the nearest major urban center but I live too far out.) Uber is ostensibly available but the couple of times I've looked out of curiosity it's not clear that there are enough drivers to actually be generally useful.
- 27182818284 9y agoI think the rideshares plus the local companies moving in to the space make for an OK vehicle of comparison. Yes, there was a time when there were so few drivers for Uber and Lyft here that it was hit or miss. That went away though. At the same time, the little local versions of Instacart and Postmates started showing up. Missed opportunity for growth. Uber and Lyft got it done
- sageabilly 9y agoThis seems incredibly short-sighted because the best way to build up a business in a market is to have market experts. What does someone in San Francisco know about the needs of people in DC who might use Postmates delivery? How do you get a business to pick Postmates over any of half a dozen competitors if you don't have boots on the ground building relationships?
- throwawaymanbot 9y agoI had to google what postmates was.
- EternalData 9y agoI've never been sure that Postmates has a model that can scale internationally. FWIW, China basically runs Postmates equivalents all across the board -- with low labour costs, you can get things delivered for pennies on the dollar. It feels like a regional play at best in my opinion...
- ghaff 9y agoThat's the general issue with so many of these personal service gig things in developed countries. There's a market for them. But a lot of people don't really have the spare cash to have a $10/hr. or so worker to do jobs for them that they could do but just don't feel like doing. Full-time drivers and house-related help are very common in some countries. In the US, you're pretty wealthy at that point.
- jv22222 9y agoI hate to say it but I've found the overall experience (and cost) doesn't compete with DoorDash, who seem to be executing extremely well on both the app and the business front.
- aphextron 9y agoDoorDash actually pays a set hourly wage, trains their employees, and focuses on customer service. What a mind blowing concept.
- pbarnes_1 9y agoHmmm... is this new? That's not what I heard from people who do DoorDash and Postmates. It used to be that you used Postmates if you wanted your food hot, and DoorDash for other deliveries. I've literally never had a DoorDash order arrive not stone cold. Maybe they've changed?
- whoisjuan 9y agoI find Postmates pricing and user experience very irritating. No transparency in fees and final price. Their fee waiving plan is ridiculous. I never pay over 25 dollars for delivered food. Also, their app user experience is simply terrible. Just the fact that they are constantly and aggressively pushing their referral program and subscription plan, makes the app feel like a cheap adware.
- torranceyang 9y agoAnd their customer service is nonexistent. I was charged way more than I should have been, and tried filing a ticket that never got answered or responded too so I just had to pay up. There's a right way to approach these delivery services, but Postmates doesn't seem to be close enough.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nradov 9y agoWhy didn't you dispute the charge with your financial institution?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- notyourday 9y ago> I never pay over 25 dollars for delivered food. I never pay over $3 to deliver food. Oh and it is delivered by the same delivery people who know the building, know where the buzzer is, know how the customer looks like. And they work for the restaurant from which the food is being ordered. Seamless for the win.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Operyl 9y agoErr seamless is just a grubhub brand no? If so, they frequently will partner with companies like Delivery Dudes who aren’t much different than Grubhub’s own contractors.
- vthallam 9y agoI have used postmates before, but don't understand how Uber Eats won't make them go out of the business. They are adding ton of new places which were not available on Seamless(NYC) and the delivery is going to be faster on UberEats.
- SirensOfTitan 9y agoWhile it scratches my 'lazy don't want to move' itch pretty well, I find Postmates pretty awful. Customer service is just dreadful. I once ordered food from a place maybe 10-15 blocks away. It took ~hours~ for the food to arrive because the delivery driver decided to take an hour phone call right down the street, food in hand. We had to go find him, as support was non-existent. A little while later they offered to credit $3 for the issue: not even covering the delivery fee we paid to go hunt down our own food. This is a typical experience: anytime anything goes wrong Postmates support is worthless.
- Macsenour 9y agoThere are a lot of these types of services and if I were at one, I would make customer service my hallmark. This seems like a no brainer to me, and yet it seems farther down the priority list for most of these delivery companies. Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot?
- icelancer 9y ago>>Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot? I haven't figured this one out. I think they all buy into the myth that customer service doesn't scale / is a cost center / doesn't have ROI, etc. Except in my business we don't do anything even close to a Postmates (where I agree, CS should be priority #1) but we ship items around the country and do like 60-80 orders per day, and we made the decision a few years ago to seriously care about email response time, always pick up the phone between certain hours, return voicemails, ship things within a discrete timeline, and more importantly, offer refunds and accept blame 99% of the time something goes wrong. The goodwill we get and social media cred from the customer service is worth a lot (tough to measure), but we also can measure ROI on the emails we reply to and phone calls we take. We find that tons of people will email or call in with an irrelevant question that has nothing to do with buying something, we'll answer it well, and they are then very likely to buy something immediately after. Customers like to know a human is there for them! Our CS department nearly has positive ROI from measurable tasks, to say nothing of the untrackable rewards mentioned above (and the feeling that we aren't scumbags, which is really the main reason we decided to do it). In an era where everyone runs customer service like Comcast, standing out can be worth a ton. We also ship product slightly worse than Amazon Prime, which is pretty damn good - in today's market everyone wants things as fast as Amazon and don't want to buy things from random websites, and I understand! So if we can come close to that shipping time (USPS Priority Mail flat rate boxes are 2 days to most major metropolitan areas - even from the coast like we are), then that picks up repeat business and people talking about how fast we ship on Twitter/Instagram/etc. It just doesn't seem that difficult to get right. But maybe it is. EDIT: Well, "difficult" is subjective. It took us over 12 months to get our CS pipeline working well. But that was more "hard" than "difficult" - it just required a lot of work to mold it into the shape we wanted. The overall design was pretty simple: Just take care of customers at any cost.
- bkeroack 9y agoI can't prove it but I suspect Postmates was hacked last week. One morning I got a login alert from Postmates (I haven't used them in at least a year, don't even have the app installed anymore). I promptly reset the password. An hour or two later I got a fraudulent charge on the credit card that was on file with them. I've had this card for years and am extremely careful with it (always use chip, etc). I suspect they are storing full numbers without the requisite security controls (a big PCI violation).
- bastian 9y agoWe're using Stripe for all payment processing and we're obviously not storing your CC number.
- citizens 9y agoHow is that obvious - It's possible to both use Stripe and store the credit card details (even though you're not supposed to).
- exogeny 9y agoI find it immensely telling that this point is the only one you've addressed so far in this thread. Nothing about how your CS sucks, the flawed business model, or the sexist comments..
- pmthrowaway 9y agoHe's probably too busy screaming at Customer Service over some perceived problem with his dinner tonight. I am not even kidding about that comment. I have heard him scream and seen him physically throw things around the office over the tiniest things and threaten to fire the entire Customer Service team because a VC's order was late.
- leesalminen 9y agoDo you share passwords across sites?
- tylermenezes 9y agoShortly after I signed up for Postmates earlier this year, they locked my account and asked me to send a scan of my passport and a recent utility bill. Not to _work_ on Postmates -- to order food. I'm not sure if that's a sign of a huge fraud problem or something else, but I'm not totally convinced that company is as successful as they claim.
- baccredited 9y agoAs an investor, I wouldn't touch any of these companies: Postmates, Seamless, DoorDash, ChowNow. What a terrible category. UberEATS and Amazon PrimeNow will probably survive, but their parent companies can afford to run them at a loss pretty much forever.
- notyourday 9y agoI'm curious why would you put Seamless into the same category as the rest?
- baccredited 9y agoThey've raised $51 million. Imagine how big they would need to get to give their investors any return at all.
- notyourday 9y agoBut their business model is technology only - those that work for the local establishment do the deliveries?
- ghaff 9y agoYou'd think people would have learned their lesson from Kozmo. There's clearly some market for home delivery. Pizza places and random Chinese restaurants have been doing it forever. But it's teenagers and other people largely working for tips. Not VC-scale "disruption." And grocery delivery works too. But it's mostly just an adjunct to B&M.
- the_economist 9y agoI'm surprised by the complaints about Postmates in this thread. I use it 1-2 times/week for various pickup tasks (food, items from walgreens, items from safeway), and I'm always pleased with the service / speed.
- pbarnes_1 9y agoDepends where you live.
- pmthrow2 9y agoPostmates is a disaster of immature management. I worked in engineering for a while. I spent many Fridays at Hotel Utah Saloon listening to Bastian try to argue his points like "Women couldn't possibly write code as well as men." I also watched the company transition from a point where Bastian and Sean would get into open fights in the middle of the office. Bastian would tell everyone they were fired. Eventually the company got bigger, they moved into a new office and Sean reasoned to keep Bastian away from the company. Bastian's hot head and immoral demeanor makes Travis Kalanik look like a good person. The only way to get ahead at Postmates is to be part of the "f-ck buddy" group in the office. Go out drinking with Sean and you will get a raise and a promotion. They brought on new managers and new middle-tier but as all of us saw, it was more of the same like minded childish ways that ran wild.
- arikr 9y ago> The only way to get ahead at Postmates is to be part of the "f-ck buddy" group in the office. ? What does that mean
- pishpash 9y agoI suppose in the "this guy f-cks" way. If not, would like to know also!
- citizens 9y agoI think it's intended to be the same thing as "bro culture"...
- jgh 9y agoI'm guessing they're referring to a group of people who go and get drinks? I don't really understand it either, but that's my guess from the followup being about going out for drinks with one of the founders.
- tarsinge 9y agoOn one hand reading hacker news left me with the impression that creating a business is incredibly difficult with so many things to get right, and on the other there are companies like this successfully raising money and growing, I'm really puzzled. Sure they are not sustainable but are investors still fooled by this? By my limited experience in the B2B space they are usually quite smart and know how to do a serious due diligence Edit: I understand the investors could have taken a conscious high risk bet on an unsustainable business model, but how it comes the founding team didn't raise any red flag to the investors before?
- hemantv 9y agoThis is just part of growing pain trying to improve the efficiency. Yes it sucks for people who lost the job but I am sure Postmates treated them really well. As a business, they have the strong brand among restaurants and customers (maybe except few HN'ers). They can certainly use some help with couriers. They will be fine all the people whining has the same reasons when Amazon got started (this will never work, this is a bad business model, shipping cost alone is bad etc). I have been hearing these arguments for past 20 years about Amazon they have grown to be the powerhouse. It always seems impossible until its done. I am pretty sure these same people still think Amazon is on verge of collapsing next day. There are people who point fingers and whine. If you listen to them they make very good convincing arguments but in the end, accomplish nothing and then there are people who go make things happen, who make impossible possible. I applaud Postmates efforts to help little guys compete with big guys. We are better off not living in Amazon monopoly.
- devopsproject 9y agoyou sound like a company shill
- hemantv 9y agoreally so every one defending Elon Musk is working for Tesla or SpaceX?
- devopsproject 9y agoi just checked your github. you have postmates listed in your profile. nice try though